CPR Process

A CPR is basically to take one existing lot and divide it into two. In Hawaii these are now considered horizontal condo units, and while you can have as much interaction as you would like, it is also possible to have pretty much nothing to do with each other. What shocks me is that you can go to a really nice house here only to find out it is technically a "condo."

Now, people will say the process takes 1-6 months. In some cases this may even be true, but in most cases, they are lying. You see, they forgot to take into account the fact that the city is involved and unless you have a personal connection on the inside, you are at the bottom of the stack and they put red tape all over your file.

For example, I mailed my letter to the city (Department of Planning and Permitting) requesting them to come do an inspection as part of the needed paperwork for a CPR. I invited them to my house to come tell me all the things that were wrong with it. Supposedly they have 30 days to respond to this type of request. After waiting over a month I finally called them, despite other people telling me I just needed to be patient. I promise I was polite and nice on the phone as I talked to person after person to finally get in touch with the inspector handling my request. Right up front he told me he was swamped, what with lay offs and furloughs, and the very soonest he could come to do my inspection would be next week.

Now, if you say you are busy I assume you mean you are busy like my hairdresser is busy. I am going to have to wait a month. Waiting a week, at least to me, is not that busy. I felt like I was being told that my request was really not that important to him and that because he wasn't going to get in trouble for not responding promptly it was easier to leave this at the bottom of the stack and hope that it just went away.

If my problems with the DPP had ended there it would have been a miracle. After having the inspection and being told he needed to pull history on the lot, but most things looked in order and I could expect to receive his letter in the mail, I thought another 30 days was a suitable amount of time to wait for that to come. In fact, to be nice, I gave him a couple extra weeks before calling him again.

This time I was told that he JUST received the history on the lot and that there were some structures which had never been correctly permitted. While they had been on the lot for over 60 years I would either have to have them removed or go through the process of as-is permitting. Debates, debates over what to do. It took one phone call and find out that expected length of as-is permitting is 4-5 months, knowing how quickly they have moved on our CPR request, we opted to demolition, which took a week.

Another inspection and a little knowledge gained, we were again on our way to getting that golden letter. This time I was smarter. I would find reasons once a week to call our inspector and check up on the status of our request. Of course it took a month again for him to get paperwork from another office for our request, but about 6 weeks after our final inspection we had that golden letter in hand.

And this my friends is why the CPR process is closer to an 8-9 month plus adventure. It all depends on how much time you want to spend nagging the DPP.

Getting Started

How did we find ourselves in the position where we are contemplating building a house on Oahu? I am sure this is what most people ask themselves when contemplating the road they have started down and reaching road block after road block in a red-tape state. Would this be paradise if you didn't have to jump through a million hoops--probably not.

So, here we are currently in the throws of completing a CPR (division of piece of land into two properties-technically a condo unit). We, like most people who build in Hawaii, will then have to tear down the homes currently on the lot and start all over again.

While this story may not always be pretty, it is ours. Off we go on the adventure of a lifetime--building a home in Hawaii.